AT Nelson Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president, praise singers dressed in tribal finery recited the history of Mandela's Xhosa clan while supersonic jets flew overhead, painting the colors of the new country's flag across the African sky. Mandela himself is a symbol of the simultaneity of the ancestral and the ultramodern, having herded cattle as a child and undergone traditional circumcision rituals as a teenager, then qualifying as a lawyer before beginning his distinguished political career. Still, it is those military jets flying in celebration of a black president that people remember as proof that apartheid had really ended, and it is rare to see the name of the country in a government or cultural publication without the accompanying adjective -- or honorific -- ''new.''

Zakes Mda's novel ''The Heart of Redness'' is a brilliant critique of this cult of newness. ''To highly civilized people like Xoliswa Ximiya,'' he writes of one character, ''isiXhosa costume is an embarrassment. She hates to see her mother looking so beautiful, because she thinks that it is high time her parents changed from ubuqaba -- backwardness and heathenism. They must become amagqobhoka -- enlightened ones -- like her.''

Mda has responded to South Africa's rapid changes and unpredictable transitions with a work that is itself a new kind of novel: one that combines Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism and political astuteness with satire, social realism and a critical re-examination of the South African past. Mda also gives Xhosa terms pride of place. (The x's, xh's and qh's represent some of the language's click sounds.)

''The Heart of Redness'' moves back and forth between the present and the mid-19th century, portraying, in often surprising guises, the age-old battle between the forces of ''progress'' and the desire to preserve a traditional life. The book's starting point is one of the strangest events in South African history, the great cattle killing of 1856-57.

By the middle of the 19th century, the Xhosa people had come under increasing pressure from white settlers moving ever deeper into their homelands. Xhosa warriors had suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the British Army, and Xhosa cattle were dying from a lung disease imported along with British herds. Then their own deadly Joan of Arc appeared, a girl named Nongqawuse who had a vision that the Xhosa nation could be saved only by an act of mass sacrifice. If the people destroyed their crops and cattle, she proclaimed, their ancestors would rise again to lead them to victory in battle, and the fields and herds would reappear in greater abundance than ever. The girl's vision took hold; many destroyed their farms and herds, and tried to force their neighbors to do the same. When the expected miracles did not take place, famine spread across the land. The ''pacified'' Xhosa ceased to offer meaningful resistance to white domination.

Mda presents the cattle-killing story sympathetically, focusing on the struggle between twin brothers, one of whom, Twin, is a believer in the visions. His brother, Twin-Twin, sees Nongqawuse's plan as madness and is determined to prevent the destruction of his people -- even if he has to make common cause with a hated British agent, John Dalton, who murdered their father and boiled his head in a caldron, then shipped it back to the British Museum. (Mda delights in such paradoxes. The British claimed to be the bearers of civilization, but their collecting of anthropological specimens was barbaric. And if the Xhosa belief in the resurrection of their ancestors is folly, what should we make of its Christian counterpart?)

The historical tale of the twins is interwoven with the story of present-day Qolorha, the town on South Africa's so-called Wild Coast where Nongqawuse had her vision. The feud between the believers and the unbelievers, which lay dormant during the apartheid years, has been reawakened among the brothers' descendants. Bhonco, leader of the unbelievers, is a man who celebrates the new life by weeping at happy moments rather than grieving over ''the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago.'' His archenemy is Zim, descendant of Twin, who holds tight to his belief in the sacredness of Nongqawuse's vision, talks in the language of the birds and opposes the planned development of a casino and water-sports theme park that Bhonco thinks will bring wealth to the town.

The current story is the reverse of the older story: now it is the unbelievers who credulously accept a vision -- that of progress and development -- and the believers who stand in the way. The prophetess had envisioned ''the new people'' striding on top of the sea; the developers hope that surfers will soon be riding the waves.

Mda uses this twinning device to explore what civilization truly means. Traditionally, the Xhosa beautify themselves with ocher, and so are often referred to as ''the red people.'' And Qolorha, where some of the locals still practice time-honored tribal arts and wear traditional dress, is, as the novel's title puts it (in a witty nod to Joseph Conrad), ''the heart of redness.''

Mda presents the tension between notions of progress and civilization both in terms of the group experience of believers and unbelievers and through the more Western device of an individual observer -- Camagu, an American-educated former exile who has come to Qolorha, driven by ''his famous lust.'' Unable to find work despite his qualifications, and disgusted by the system of patronage and cronyism set up by the new regime, Camagu had been about to return to America when he decided to search for a Xhosa woman from Qolorha he had heard singing at a funeral in Johannesburg. He doesn't find her, but is soon attracted to the ''cold and distant'' beauty of Xoliswa Ximiya, Bhonco's daughter, a school principal who studied in Athens, Ohio, for six months and desperately longs for the perquisites of the big city.

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Bhonco assumes that the well-educated Camagu will become his son-in-law and political supporter, and so is infuriated when Camagu falls in love with Zim's daughter, Qukezwa. This girl is a true child of nature who rides bareback and still knows the ancient and beautiful art of ''split-tone'' singing; in other words, she represents the traditional way of life. Qukezwa becomes pregnant, supposedly without having ''known a man,'' after a wild night ride with Camagu. Meanwhile, he buys a cottage in Qolorha and, with Qukezwa's help, sets up a local women's cooperative to make and sell traditional Xhosa clothing (in contrast to the ruling elite's ''black empowerment'' schemes, which will enrich only themselves and their families).

The novel abounds with ironic observations. The present-day descendant of the head-boiling trader, also named John Dalton, ''speaks much better isiXhosa'' than Camagu will ever be able to and has, unlike him, gone through the Xhosa circumcision rituals. Dalton, in turn, ''is fascinated by an umXhosa man who has spent so many years living in America,'' while he has rarely left the Eastern Cape. There is a lovely, humorous set piece when the developers come to explain their scheme to the villagers, and a lone black spokesman points out ''how lucky they are to be living in a new and democratic South Africa . . . in which the government has respected them by consulting them,'' and argues that they should respect the government in turn by not voicing any criticism.

Unfortunately, although Mda manages a convoluted plot with exquisite skill, his writing is sometimes clumsy. In one of the historical flashbacks, a colonial governor's announcement that the new judicial system ''will gradually undermine and destroy Xhosa laws and customs'' is met with ''deafening'' applause and punctuated with ''a conspiratorial wink.'' When Camagu visits a Johannesburg bar, ''screeching saxophones rasped his eardrums. The out-of-tune piano murdered Abdullah Ibrahim with every clunk.'' Such lines contrast sharply with Mda's witty aperçus and delightful magical scenes, like the one in which Zim sends raucous birds to follow his rival Bhonco ''wherever he goes, emitting their rude laughter.''

This same vivid inventiveness and acerbic iconoclasm is evident throughout Mda's earlier novel, ''Ways of Dying,'' which won South Africa's top literary prize and has been turned into a popular play. This marvelous picaresque follows Toloki, a man who goes from funeral to funeral perfecting his ability to produce heart-rending moans and cries of sorrow in his self-invented role of professional mourner.

Toloki has created his own special diet, ''a delicacy of Swiss cake relished with green onions,'' and this, along with his habit of dousing himself in perfume and rarely bathing, gains him plenty of room at crowded gravesites. He even has his own uniform, a velvet cape and black top hat from a theatrical supply store, bought for him by the owners of the neighboring restaurants so he'd stop hanging around outside the shop, disturbing their patrons. Toloki's vocation earns him enough to take taxis instead of riding the country's dangerous trains; as he puts it, his ''sacred trust'' of ''mourning for the dead makes it possible for me to avoid death by using alternative transport.''

Beneath Toloki's sly humor, Mda's purpose comes through clearly: to show how many ways of dying there are in the transition to a new South Africa, whether through the brutality of white overseers and policemen or that of black gangsters. Death is behind the novel's love story too, as Toloki meets a former beauty from his rural village at the funeral for her child, a 5-year-old who got on the wrong side of township politics, perishing in a deliberately set fire.

''Ways of Dying'' is written in the casual style of collective oral storytelling, filled with homespun wisdom and memories of old quarrels. And yet, for all his celebration of group experience, Mda shows its downside: the Young Tigers, anonymous local thugs, are responsible for the boy's murder. Like another community that Toloki has visited, this one ''would forever be enshrouded by the smell of burning flesh.''

The constant presence of death offers opportunities to others besides Toloki, including a pretentious, wealthy former ''homeboy'' from his village whose ''business interests . . . had expanded far beyond the mere manufacture of coffins'' to the creation of ''plastic and silk wreaths, and of funeral haute couture for women, especially the widows of millionaires.''

Reflecting the startling contrasts in such a world, tender humor and brutal violence vie with each other in Mda's pages, as do vibrant life and sudden death. The struggle between them creates an energetic and refreshing literature for a country still coming to terms with both the new and the old.